Israel can destroy Hezbollah’s military in days

The IDF can destroy Hezbollah’s military capabilities in a matter of days, National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz said on Tuesday.

Speaking at the 21st Herzliya Conference at Reichman University, Gantz said a major challenge for Israel is to return the southern and northern residents back to their homes, even at the price of escalation.

He said he heard the reports about the Hezbollah threat to bring down Israel’s electrical grid, and responded, “We can bring Lebanon completely into the dark, and take apart Hezbollah’s power in days.”

The former defense minister and IDF chief of staff said the price to “Israel will be heavy. We need to back up our institutions. We need to be ready for major incidents of harm to the public. We should try to avoid it, but if we need to do it, we cannot be deterred from it.

“We cannot let Hezbollah keep threats close to the northern border,” he added, “We need to get the northern residents back by September 01.”

Another challenge for Israel that Gantz discussed was building a regional and global alliance against Iran.

“We still have the opportunity of normalization with the Saudis and other states, to build what we started to build, the Middle East air defense, to form a stranglehold on the Iranian axis,” he said.

He emphasized that Israel must work hard with the US to build up Israel’s defenses and to be ready for ‘the Judgment Day’ of stopping Iranian nuclear weapons.

A third challenge he noted was the long-term conflict with Hamas, including the need for a political plan to replace the terror group’s management of Gaza.

He pushed hard for a hostage deal, even at the cost of ending the war for now.

Gantz noted that the US only killed Osama Bin Laden of al-Qaeda in 2011, 10 years after 9/11, meaning that even a long ceasefire would in no way mean that Israel would allow Gaza Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar to live out his days without killing him.

Rather, he said, it was clear that Hamas would continue to promote terror and their actions would give Israel the later excuse to eliminate him and other top Hamas leaders.

In any event, he said it would take years to replace Hamas at a governance level, but credited the IDF with destroying Hamas’s existing military capacities.

Earlier at the conference, Reichman University President Boaz Ganor said, “Hamas is a tactical threat, Hezbollah is a strategic threat, and Iran is an existential threat.”

He warned that Israel had fallen into Iran’s trap, spending nine months fighting a player of minimal importance and wasting large amounts of goodwill globally, while Tehran has mostly gotten to sit back and watch.

Further, he said Iran is playing long-term chess, with Israel playing short-term poker. Ganor even argued that Iran knew more than Israeli intelligence has said, meaning that it really did plan the entire October 07 invasion.

In addition, he argued that Iran and Hezbollah’s denials of knowing Hamas’s plans were also pre-coordinated.

He did not specifically say that Tehran knew the date of the invasion, but Ganor has argued that Hamas was not sophisticated enough to pull off the coordinated massive rocket attack land invasion simultaneously on its own, nor was it capable of the extreme information security it undertook to avoid the IDF detecting the moment of the invasion.

Iraq wants US military out

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani on Friday said he would set up a dialogue to discuss the removal of the US military presence in his country after an American strike killed an Iraqi militia leader in Baghdad.

In an address, al-Sudani said the agreement under which American troops are based in Iraq maintains the equal sovereignty of both countries, saying the US strike violated that sovereignty. 

“We have repeatedly emphasized that in the event of a violation or transgression by any Iraqi party, or if Iraqi law is violated, the Iraqi government is the only party that has the right to follow up on the merits of these violations,” al-Sudani said in remarks shared by his office.

The prime minister said he was in the process of setting up a bilateral dialogue with the United States to discuss the removal of some 2,500 American troops in his country.

“It is a commitment that the government will not back down from, and will not neglect anything that would complete national sovereignty over the land, sky, and waters of Iraq,” he said.

The US strike on Thursday killed Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi, the leader of an Iranian-backed militia group Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba (HHN), after landing near a security headquarters in Baghdad.

According to the US allegations, HHN is part of the Popular Mobilization Forces, a network of Iranian proxy groups and militias in Iraq. Iranian-backed groups have repeatedly attacked US troops in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea since the breakout of the Israel-Hamas war.

Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Thursday the US is in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government to defeat the US-designated terrorist group ISIS, but he stressed forces will take action to protect themselves.

“This was a necessary, proportionate act,” Ryder said, adding Iraq is an important and valued partner, with which the US seeks to maintain good ties.

 

 

Israel-Hamas war fueling fears in United States

Incendiary rhetoric about the war between Israel and Hamas is contributing to a stark rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism in the United States — and raising the risk that violent words could turn into actions. 

Three 20-year-old Palestinian men were shot and injured near the University of Vermont on Saturday after being confronted by a white man with a handgun while walking along a street — incident federal authorities are investigating as a possible hate crime. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday a sharp increase in threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities across the US has been recorded since the beginning of the war, which has highlighted sharp divisions in American society over the Middle East, particularly on college campuses.

“There is understandable fear in communities across the country,” Garland said. 

Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said that since October 07 there has been a tremendous amount of awful content circulating online about Israel and Palestine, much of which is false or demonizing.

“Much of it conflates Hamas with all Palestinians, and even Muslims, and on the other side, it conflates the Israeli leadership with all Israelis, and even all Jews,” Benesch said, “That makes it easy for people who are consuming that rhetoric … to want to take revenge against the people who are perceived by them to be members of the largest of those groups — that is to say, Muslims on one side and Jews on the other.” 

In the first four weeks following Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel’s southern border, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy organization — documented a 216% increase over the previous year in reports of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias.   

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which fights hate and antisemitism, similarly documented a 388% increase in antisemitic incidents in the US over the first two weeks of the war, compared with the same period last year. 

Conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has erupted over decades many times before, but the unprecedented attack launched by Hamas on October 07 — and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza in the weeks since — has created some of the deepest political rifts the US has seen on the matter in modern history.

Those fractures have been put under a microscope in the past 52 days, during which supporters of both sides have taken to American streets in droves to protest.  

“This conflict has polarized people not only in the United States, but all over the world more quickly and severely than any other event,” Benesch said. “Even people who have no personal ties to either side are extremely passionate and agitated about it.” 

In Congress, zealous rhetoric and acts by some lawmakers have only further steeped divisions in an already polarized nation. 

Ryan Zinke introduced a bill earlier this month that could ban Palestinians from entering the US and possibly expel those who are already here. Zinke described the bill as the most anti-Hamas immigration legislation I have seen, conflating all Palestinians with the militant group. 

GOP presidential nominee Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, has suggested the US should not take in any Palestinian refugees from Gaza because they are all antisemitic.

The only Palestinian American serving in Congress Rashida Tlaib was censured earlier this month over her criticism of Israel. She posted a video on X, formerly known as Twitter, that said President Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people and included clips of protesters chanting from the river to the sea, a phrase defined by the Anti-Defamation League as antisemitic.  Tlaib defended her stance, saying she will not be silenced and I will not let you distort my words. 

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie on Sunday placed some blame on former President Trump, suggesting his intolerant language rubbed off on the rest of the country. Trump was harshly criticized during his presidency for promoting antisemitic tropes and Islamophobic beliefs.  

“When you show intolerance towards everyone, which is what he does, you give permission as a leader for others to have their intolerance come out,” Christie told CNN of Trump. “So intolerance towards anyone encourages intolerance towards everyone. And that’s exactly what’s going on here.” 

Garland said Monday that the Justice Department is closely monitoring the impact the conflict may have in inspiring extremists at home and abroad, opening discussions with local law enforcement and community leaders to discuss any threats.  

When people are horrified, they often seek accountability, Benesch said. An Illinois landlord, for example, was charged with a hate crime last month after being accused of stabbing and killing a 6-year-old Muslim boy in suburban Chicago — a striking example of people who are “neither Palestinian nor Israeli becoming violent” in response to the conflict, she said.  

Tensions have been especially high on American college campuses for students on both sides who have said they fear for their safety at school. Threats and attacks on Jewish and Arab Muslim students have seen a marked rise since the war began with heated protests sometimes turning violent.

The Palestinian men shot in Vermont on Saturday are all US university students. The man who pleaded not guilty to the shooting was a 48-year-old white man. Two of the victims were American citizens, while a third was a legal resident. Two of the victims at the time of the shooting were wearing keffiyehs, a type of scarf associated with the Palestinian cause.

Benesch said fiery rhetoric on the rise in the US since the start of the war could cause some Americans to take matters into their own hands, no matter how misguided those efforts may be.

“Someone who wants revenge, who wants to hold someone responsible, sometimes wants to do that personally,” Benesch said. “In this country … it’s easier to find a Jew than an Israeli — and it’s exactly the same thing on the other side.”